There was a short window of time (anthropological scale) in the western world where this was seemingly true. The American conservative propaganda latched onto it and tricked people into thinking it was true. The fact is whenever quick upward mobility has been possible anywhere for a large number of people, it has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour. It was someone else's hard work that w…
> has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour As far as I understand, this is actually a myth - at least the first two. It's a common cynical refrain that the current level of abundance would be impossible without slavery. There are many many places where there has been slavery throughout the years, and they have not ended up richer for it. The American South, where slavery was more prevalen…
> The interdependency between North and South was more than the direct connection between mass production of cheap cotton in the South, picked by enslaved people, and the success of northern textile mills. Recently, historians of American capitalism argued that slavery was even more tightly connected with the modernizing national and global economy. Above all that the U.S. domestic slave trade, worth perhaps $440m in total and moving more enslaved people (about 750,000) since 1790 than the middle passage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was crucial in the westward movement of investment together with the development of new financial products including securities, bonds, and mortgages. These historians have revealed how deeply committed many nineteenth century banks, especially in New York, were to the continued expansion of slavery.
https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-north-and-slav...